


Waiting to Exhale or, Pate Brisee Mountain

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: M/M, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-12
Updated: 2011-04-12
Packaged: 2017-10-17 23:26:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/182475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU: After the war, Zoe can't get pregnant. Mal can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting to Exhale or, Pate Brisee Mountain

_Love, oh love, oh careless love!  
See what love has done to me._

My dogs hurt. My stomach had an unsettledness, more than just from too many fried onions and a few too many brews. I just wanted my shift to end, so's I could put my feet up. But I didn't want it to end, 'cause then I'd either have to go home to Jayne or fight with him 'bout where I was 'twixt the end of my shift and time I actually got home. And not only could he win a fair fight, he had more'n one way of preventin' one. Preventin' it bein' fair, that is.

I looked over at Table Four, see if they needed more coffee or somethin'. Girl looked plenty jumpy enough 'thout any more java. Somethin' in her eyes that made me sad, but made me want to back away. She musta been just a kid during the War, so that wasn't it, but I conjured maybe them that had their joke with us mighta had another card up their sleeve too.

"Mei-mei, you have to eat," the fella with her said. "It's…it's actually **very good** ," he said, astonished. "It's delicious!" I sneaked a look, and of course it was my Capissen-38 Pie, not the stew they'd been pushin' back and forth on their blue plates.

And I knew it was a mistake but I sneaked a look at him too, and damn he was handsome. And just look where that kind o' thinkin' got me.

"It's heavenly!" Sir Warwick boomed, from Table Eight, which was pretty much welded to his ass all day till closing time. "Tastes like it fell right outta the sky!" He shook his head. "Mal, your pies are the only things sit good on my stomach these days."

The fella gave Sir Warwick kind of a narrow look, squinching down his eyes, which weren't so dark as blueberries. "Less is more, Simon!" the girl said, and he shhh'ed at her and made sure she et up all her pie.

All Zoe's tables was paid up and cleared, so she and Wash stood in the kitchen canoodlin' whiles they waited for me to finish Table Four so's we could all go home. Zoe and me ain't so close as we was, since she changed her mind 'bout the short-order cook and stopped threatenin' to shoot him for followin' her 'round. Well, truth to tell, we lost a mite of closeness when I took up with Jayne. She never much favored him, when he'd come in for breakfast with the other guys workin' the Help Desk, when we was closin' up and they was gettin' ready to sit in front of a Cortex screen all night, catch the outer Core planets and some of the near-in Rim planets. And not that it didn't turn out she was right. He was just the biggest gorram geek of the whole bunch. Biggest I ever saw. With, you know, his short-sleeved shirt and pocket protector. And the muscles stickin' out of the bottom of his sleeves. And the tattoo…But, like they say, kissin' don't last, cookin' do.

You'd be surprised how many Browncoats—well, to the extent there's any Browncoats left—that ended up in some sorta business to do with food. It helps settle us down, what with first the rats bein' the competition for food, then bein' the food, then bein' what we had 'stead of a birthday cake.

Zoe wasn't on Hera, thank God, but she was tested plenty in the fiery furnace on her own. And maybe it was poison gas or chemical warfare. Maybe it was somethin' they done to us in the Reeducation Facilities where they said they fixed us up good's new to go home. If we had one, that is. Joke of it is, whether it was what they done to us or just the way our luck fell out, but Zoe can't seem to catch pregnant.

But me, I could.

Musta been last U-Day, when Jayne an' me got home hi-larious an' black an'blue and, do I even gotta say it, blind drunk. By then it'd been a long time since I let him…well, you know. Nature, or some un-Natural variety thereof, took its course. And that put me in a quandary, 'cause I'd been meanin' to show Jayne a clean pair of heels, take the money I got saved up, and enter the Rim Worlds Bake-Off. Top prize is a hundred thousand plat, and that'd be enough to start all over somewheres new,

That good-lookin' type and the girl (turns out she really was his sister after all) didn't come in every day, but they came in some, enough for me to miss him—them—when they wasn't there. Sometimes they'd come in when it warn't my shift. According to Raelene—she's the morning girl—they're here 'cause there's a racetrack, and the girl—River's her name—kinda knows who's gonna win, more often than she should. And it seems he plays some cards, and maybe she wiggles her nose some when she wanders 'round the table sippin' at a Shirley Temple.

So this one day, they was havin' breakfast about four in the afternoon, it was one of the days I'd gotta come in at seven to bake the pies and worked breakfast and lunch too, and I was flat out. Simon followed me into the stockroom and shut the door behind me. He took a deep breath, and said, "I shouldn't tell you this. But. I heard from Raelene that, that you have some scores to settle with the Alliance. Some…experiments. And I do too. My sister…well, I still don't know what they did to her. I had to have her smuggled away from a top-secret facility. We're running away from what happened to her."

"And your partner…look, has he been abusing you? I used to think that I was the kind of person that the law protected, but I'm not anymore. But there are ways. Legal and otherwise. And if we could run away, so could you."

"I ain't afraid, precisely," I said. "Or ain't afraid of what he'd do to me. But there was this one time, we was goin' at it—in the arguin' sense of the word that is—and he said if I tried to leave him, he'd shoot himself. In the stomach. You know what bein' gut-shot does to a man?"

"I most assuredly do," he said. "I'm a doctor. Well, I am when I'm in civilization. I've seen some, well, nightmarish sights."

"And men like me caused most of 'em."

He took another gulp of air. "You're pregnant, aren't you?"

I started to say naah, that I'd just been too hard at my own pie, but I nodded.

"Do you want a termination?" he said. "I can't lie to you, it's more complicated than, well, than, you know, but if you want to leave your partner and start over, and if you didn't plan for a baby…"

"Think I'll carry on with it," I said. Only God I was addressin' these days was porcelain, but I had plenty of Technicolor yawns to think it over. "Alliance sucks, Jayne was horny, I was dumb. None of it's the critter's fault, and I seen too much death and not enough life in my time." I think he looked relieved.

A couple of days after that, we was in the stockroom again, after Sir Warwick undertook to walk River home and left me the keys to lock up. And this time, while Simon spent half the time sayin' "Unethical" and "Unprofessional" and "Suicidally risky" and the other half sayin' "Oh God," well, it was a good thing everyone else was outta there 'cause I ended up perched on the counter and Simon slidin' down my front and just at the good part I threw my hands around so's I knocked down a whole stack of skillets. And the littl'un crashed into a can of tomatoes. You'da thought there was Incoming.

And we went on for a few weeks, pretendin' that we weren't huddled on the edge of a knifeblade. Someone who wasn't Jayne woulda noticed the bay window I was gettin', but Jayne'd be scared a rugrat would take the spotlight away from him, so's he blindfolded himself real good.

One day, Simon stood up from the booth where he and River were playin' cribbage with Sir Warwick, and asked me to show him what I did with my pies. "It's…an art form!" he said. "Ephemeral art!" Whatever that meant, I showed him how to make the different kinds of crust, cut in your cold fats, stop splashin' when there's just enough ice water to hold it all together. How to roll it out. I think he was impressed that I could get a crust to a perfect circle every time, in just a few sweeps of the pin. (Well, actually I used an old vodka bottle, corked up with cold water inside.) How to open up the door of the cooler, listen to what speaks to you. Is there fruit? Does it want pastry cream? Or are you down to a few eggs and a scrape of nutmeg for vinegar pie?

And there we stood, his arm 'round my middle, his head stretched up to meet my shoulder. Can't tell for sure 'cause he was behind me, but I think he was smilin'. Feelin' a critter kick and it wasn't even his own. That's when I thought that he was a good man. All right, maybe that was later than it should have been, but I never said I was in the top three percent o' nothin'. Well, pies.

Two days later I came in to work, and Table Eight was empty but near to everyone I ever met in my life was sittin' at Table Four with long faces.

"Your friend…" Simon said. "I'm sorry. Well…I had some radioisotope materials in my bag. I could shrink the tumors a little, but not enough for them to be operable, even so. But I think, with that and other palliative measures, I don't think he suffered as much as he might have. And he and River like…liked each other. They made each other feel…less alone."

I sat down. Zoe brought me a napkin and a glass of water. Then I got right up again when Wash said that there was a wave for me. A lawyer, workin' for the Warwick Harrow Estate. He left me some money that I got in a few months (right about when my apron strings wouldn't pin) and some more Sir Warwick put into a trust for the baby.

The money for me wasn't much, but it was enough to pay our passage to St. Alban's (two tickets and overweight baggage). Simon was worried—well, I think they gave him a special class in MedAcad, Stuff a Normal Person Wouldn't Worry About—that Jayne might kick up a ruckus, or that the pressure and geeforce changes would be bad for the baby. But, as River says, he never throws anythin' out. So they still had the stasis box. I tell ya, it's the only way to fly.

I placed third. Twenty-five thousand plat. They just weren't ready for the hint of ancho chili infused into the grated-apple crème brulee Shall We Gather At the River pie. In my estimation, I was robbed.

So that's it. Finnee. The story of how we got here, at the Browncoat Café on Bernadette. Ain't nowhere near so fancy as Persephone, but a working man can get a good meal here at a price he can afford. And, of course, a piece of pie for dessert.

It's August now, so River ain't back to school yet—Simon knows what sort of high-falutin' science stuff she's studyin', it's all Greek to me—so she's croonin' a lullaby to Zo. Short for Zoroaster. River says he was some kinda mucky-muck back on Earth-that-Was, and we couldn't very well call him Zoe. Back when I was yellin' my head off and River let me squash her hand, Simon promised her she could name the baby. I gotta teach him to stop writin' blank checks.

He works the night ER at St. Athanasius Hospital. They kinda pretend they don't know he ain't got a license. Right now this minute, though, what he's doin' is rollin' out the crusts for tomorrow's special, Dot the Heart Pie. Strawberry chiffon…it's the new waitress' favorite. Told her to be sure and leave some for the payin' customers, but it's hard to deny that girl nothin' once she puts her dimples to work.

And if I didn't know Simon, I wouldn't be able to figure out what he's singin' under his breath just by any musicality of it. But I do so I joined in from the sink where I'm washin' up two flats of berries ready to slice 'em up.

 _I don't care, I'm still free.  
You can take this pie from me._

**Author's Note:**

> A fusion of the movie "Waitress," where a pregnant artist whose medium is pie falls in love with an OB/GYN.


End file.
